The Car Won't Start (working title)

I had turned the steering wheel back and forth, pumped the clutch, and wiggled the key in the ignition. Barely keeping my balance on the ice, I got out of the driver’s seat and rocked my 1989 Toyota pickup back and forth, hoping to jiggle whatever had become unjiggled back into place. No dice. It was becoming more and more official that my truck wasn’t going start with my amateurish coaxing.

Before this starts sounding overly dramatic, let me clarify that I wasn’t in a particularly life threatening situation. Uncomfortable, sure, but by no means dire. It was noon on a Friday and I was stuck in the parking lot of my local supermarket. I considered my options. I didn’t want to call a shop or a tow truck just yet- the last time this had happened my truck came to life a few hours later with no part replacements or fluid refills necessary. I decided to walk the couple miles home, and come back and check on my truck later when my boyfriend came home from work.

The only hook, however, was the weather. The temperature was below freezing, but snow did not float silently and picturesquely from the sky. Instead hunks of rain pelted down, slamming into the ground with apparent vengeance. When I walked to my car that morning, it was encased on all sides by a thin layer of ice, resembling an oblong rippled jellyfish. Slushy puddles emerged around curbs and in driveways, covered in dubiously strong partial coatings of ice. Coincidentally, the night before I had finished reading the story of Randy Morgensen, a ranger in the high Sierra backcountry who had spent his last few moments on earth pinned by rushing water to the wall of an icy lake after having crossed an ice bridge which had given way. Granted, a parking lot in upstate New York was no remote Sierra back country, but it did make the slashes of sharp, windy snow seem just a little more ominous.

The market was in the type of area that has found its way into the outskirts of nearly every major town in recent years, with gargantuan chain bookstores, restaurants, hardware stores, and a Wal-Mart. You know the area- you may swing by after work to pick up a copy of “Eat, Pray, Love” for your aunt for her birthday, but it’s certainly not the type of place you stroll through leisurely on Saturday afternoon. The main road was one of those “formerly the main highway until a bigger highway got built nearby” type of roads, not constructed with pedestrians in mind. The condo we were living in was tucked away right off this main road, backing up on a chunk of forest that would no doubt be developed similarly in the upcoming years. I was not anticipating this walk being overly pleasant, but I have the tendency of being somewhat stubborn when I decide to take something on.

I was a bit chagrined to realize that despite leaving the house thinking I looked kind of cute, or at least appropriate for running errands, nearly half of what I was wearing was completely appropriate for a walk in the snow. I had bought my hat for doing fish surveys in Alaska, I had worn my fleece on many backpacking trips, and my down vest had kept me warm during lots of cold nights in the Sierras. Even the yoga pants I was wearing would wick away water. While my attire was certainly convenient for the situation at hand, the minor fantasy that I successfully disguised myself as an urbanite had been dashed.

After wrapping up my purse and its contents in plastic grocery bags swiped from the market, I began my trek. Even as I crossed the parking lot towards the main road, I realized that I had gotten myself into a jarringly adventurous situation. It was cold. Really cold. The wind flapped all loose articles of clothing, and the freezing rain found its way inside the collar of my jacket. My nose went numb. I quickly soaked my running shoes (the weakest part of my ensemble) and had to keep wiggling my baby toes to keep my socks from freezing solid. Even with my slapdash winter garb on, I felt like I was at that part of an outdoor adventure when you realize you have gotten in a little over your head.

I slogged on down the road, tucking myself behind the guardrail to avoid being run down by a semi or a freewheeling minivan. Not much care had been put in to making the area “pedestrian friendly”, which is a bit of an understatement considering there was not a sidewalk in site. Somewhat ironically the road was lined with car dealerships, and I amused myself by fantasizing that it was an intentional juxtaposition in order to increase business (“I’m sick of walking on this damn road with no sidewalk! I’m going to buy a car right now!”). At one point I heard rumbling, and turned to see a giant man in an equally giant snowplow barreling in my direction. Trapped between the main road and a small embankment, there was nowhere for me to escape the concoction of brown slushy ice, freezing water, and dirty rocks that it had churned up. The man caught my eye, shrugged his shoulders, and in desperation I threw myself face down against the embankment, hoping to avoid the worst of the concoction. I was mediocre in my success.

After picking myself up and wiping myself off, I thought back on nicer (warmer) days. The previous summer, a family friend and I had gone on a weekend-long backpacking trip in Big Sur. We were a couple miles from our car when the narrow trail transitioned into a dirt road, and given that it was getting late we decided to try and flag down a ride. We heard a car approaching and stuck out our thumbs. The SUV rumbled past us up the road without stopping, leaving a cloud of dust behind it for us to inhale. As it passed, we could see through the back windshield that its back seat was empty. We stared at one another, aghast. The prospect that this person, having seen our need for a ride, would actually disregard it and continue on, was unthinkable. It was akin to finding someone hurt on the side of the trail and leaving him or her. This jerk in the SUV had violated one of the cardinal rules of wilderness ethics- help each other out.

But today, car after car whipped past, none of them stopping to offer me a ride, and I didn’t feel the same anger that I did in Big Sur that summer. While I was filled with a vague, sinking disappointment, I knew that every person’s decision not to stop was couched in a mental process that justified it. I was an axe murder, they couldn’t pull over in time, they were late, the front seat was full of trash. I don’t think these were excuses to justify selfishness, but rather ways that we deal with the utterly overwhelming complexity of everyday modern life. My bet is that most people who saw me trudging through the snow wanted to pick me up, but you can’t give money to every homeless person. You can’t adopt every puppy. So we donate money to a cause we believe in or we volunteer on the weekends, as if compassion had an on/off switch. Or does that just make it easier to drive on by?

I have always been attracted to the outdoors, and I can’t deny that some it has to do with the utter clarity that dictates one’s actions. If you are thirsty in the wilderness, you don’t have to face the grocery store, with its entire aisle of water and the ensuing mental process it takes to get from there to drinking. What brand? How much does it cost? Plastic or glass? Where is it from? Should I just drink tap water? While nature holds its own physical challenges, for the most part they are set in front of you cleanly and neatly, like a math problem or a cake recipe. You find a stream, boil water, purify it. The chain of decisions begins and ends at a single point. The decision tree of the water aisle branches out into so many directions, with some much trust placed in things we can’t see or touch. The conclusion is guaranteed, but at what consequence?

Sometimes I think I am not fit for this world. I wish I could be more like the people driving by me today, who don’t think about the ways in which we draw boundaries around ourselves. But as much as I will always enjoy the crispness of the high Sierras or watching the sun melt into the ocean from the cliffs above, I don’t want to need the wilderness to make a decision with clarity. I don’t want to be absolved of responsibility, to cop out and turn my decisions over to a trail or a rainstorm. The real challenge lies in the normalcy of the side of the road here today, where it’s not life and death, where the weather feels like the wilderness, but there is no turn out to stop and think. How do I sort through the overwhelming choices and make a decision with clarity? How do I decide when to stop the car and when to drive on by, and know that I made the right decision?

No one offered me a ride that day, as much as wished they would. Sick of dodging the spray from cars, I cut through a small forest to cover the last half-mile and hacked my way through saplings and shrubs with plastic bags wrapped around their bases. At home, I wrung out my icy clothes, threw them in the dryer, and climbed into the shower to thaw out. Later that night my boyfriend came home, and he drove me the couple miles down the road to the grocery store parking lot. A man was walking on the side of the road and I though about picking him up, but we were only going a short distance and he looked disheveled and dirty. We made it to my truck. I put my key in the ignition, and turned it. It started.